Comment by AStonesThrow
2 days ago
I had a recent adventure attempting to replenish my Food Grade 35% Hydrogen Peroxide.
Amazon wouldn't even ship the stuff here. I'm coming to realize that any truly potent or powerful substance is strictly off-limits in consumer spaces. Plenty of good reasons for that. But such things as pure isopropyl and pure H2O2 are so versatile and tantalizing to have on-hand, rather than household cleaners with proprietary formulas, as much dilution as possible, unique MSDS, and obnoxious fake fragrance.
I can walk down an entire aisle in the hardware store, chockablock with bottles of household cleaners, and they all amount to 2 or 3 active ingredients, endlessly remixed for credulous homemakers.
35% — that's wishful thinking where I am. I can get 3% in a supermarket and 6% in a pharmacy. I can get H2O2 stronger than 6% but it's a major undertaking, and one is treated with suspicion and or put onto registers—like 'what the fuck do you want that dangerous stuff for?'.
"I'm coming to realize that any truly potent or powerful substance is strictly off-limits in consumer spaces."
There's no doubt about this and it's a damn pain. Outside industrial settings, chemicals that really work are becoming very difficult to get. I accept that highly concentrated (say >50%) H2O2 is dangerous and not something I want or need, and fuel grade (>70%) needs special handling thus the need for controls, but concentrations of about 20% are useful for bleaching where sodium hypochlorite is unsuitable, etc. For example, 6% H2O2 often isn't strong enough to remove foxing from documents, books, etc. so having ready access to a more concentrated solution that I could dilute to suit would be very useful.
It wasn't always like this, I'm old enough to remember when I could get most chemicals I wanted with little effort. Unfortunately, both occupational health and safety and terrorism have put the kibosh on ready availability, controls and restrictions have screwed all of us legitimate users.
Of course, restrictions covering to whom chemicals are sold haven't detrimentally affected the chemical companies one iota, in fact I'd maintain they've benefited them. They've proteced companies from potential lawsuits when users misuse chemicals and they've provided endless possibilities for them to market nigh-on-useless products to naïve consumers like the household cleaners to which you have referred. I could give examples of how some common household products have become less potent over the years but it'd take a full blog to go into details.
There's another downside here too, the less consumers know about the chemicals they use the more unskilled they become at actual chemistry—even if taught chemistry, using products whose ingredients are unknown doesn't add to their understanding. That's also a matter that I've not time to elaborate about here except to say lack of knowledge about chemicals is one of the significant reasons why society is becoming overly chemical-phobic.